Jamie Cason's world reduced to bite-sized ape snacks

Sport Relief Mile

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I and itunes

SuperZeep: Zeep: Nina Miranda & Chris Franck PresentThe 21st century version of Getz/Gilberto, Nina Miranda and Chris Franck have also been Smoke City and Da Lata. The stand-out track here is Super. Psychedelic/folk/funk mayhem, once you've heard it you need it. Instant classic. Rest of the album is by turns whimsical, mid-tempo, summery-breezy blowing through Tropicalia.

ChicagoSufjan Stevens: IllinoiseThis artist, unbeknownst to him, provided the soundtrack to trailer for a crazy virtual world I was developing with the lovely Marc Williams at Mook. Since then, my boy Hari kicked off a compy CD with this track. Fragile vocals, great arrangement, everything an anthem should have. Martha has taught Alfie a dance for it. Apparently Sufjan is on mission to do an LP for each of the 50 United States. Go Suf!

Singing The Blues

Me Links

TF2 is sooo much fun, amazingly well designed and so lusciously illustrated you can say goodbye to Time whether you thought you had it spare or not. Never has shooting from your own point of view been as shirk making as this.

I hired Okami from the library last week. It is absolutely stupendous. It is certainly in my top ten of cultural products of all time.

In this game you play the Shinto sun goddess, Amaterasu, incarnated as a white wolf. Your mission is to bring the life back to a Nippon infested by decay, disease and a host of cheeky demons. The ink and wash setting is gorgeous and the design of the Celestial Brush as a mechanic is so clever and so (tricky) rewarding as a special power. I gather this is reminiscent of Zelda, which makes me want to catch up with that. It also reminded me very much of Princess Mononoke in theme, tone and the fact there's a prominent role for a large, white, mystical canine.

There's probably a word for cultural tourists like me who love to take mini-breaks in versions of Japan like this. I'm sure I miss most of the allusions, I can't read the kanji that spills out of engine but I just love it, love it, love it.

Capcom closed the developer, Clover Studio, after all the team left to start Seeds. Can't wait for the fruit.

I want my MOG funked up! Got round to signing up to Passively Multiplayer Game. It is fresh. And ingenious. I'm Moonking and need to work out how to get badge widget onto here and then the inevitable grind to get some status. Games of life like life itself.

This was the best football experience I've had to date at Portman Road. A very, very sweet victory over our arch rivals Norwich. The strength of feeling you can only really appreciate if you're part of a similar tribal/pack mentality. The atmosphere of 25,000 people losing their minds to the extent that they stay after the match to sing Status Quo's "Rocking all over the World" to 2,000 visiting supporters who have to sit and take it, before the police will let them leave.

This is a great concept, public service gaming epitomised: Wired News: Games Tackle Middle East Conflict. I'd love to see something set in Iraq where you play as an Iraqi civilian trying to exist in the madness. I think the power of games to put you in someone elses shoes, to see through their eyes are attributes which could be exploited more to raise awareness of complex political and cultural issues.

Chocks away! Here's a game where you can shoot at photographic maps of your favourite cities with a cartoon plane: Goggles: fly-by city strafing Of course, it's fun, silly! Though watch out for heavy-handed, probably fatal attempt to arrest the developer for sedition. Here I complete a successful payload delivery to Buckingham Palace. Now, I'm twiddling my handle-bar moustache waiting for the deluge of screenies of other inappropriate attacks.

Duran Duran will build their own version of the world, the world as it should have been, reports BBC News Online. Following up on the excellent work of BBC Radio One in this regard, Nick Rhodes said that he hoped,

"the Duran Duran community would help develop the island into a "fully functional, futuristic utopia".

I was thinking earlier on, as I was looking at the work of the Vapour Brothers that artists, especially musicians, create a kind of reality, a shared experience or sensibility that you are desperate to be part of. The Vapours are mates of Radiohead and the clip linked above shows some moments of intimate informality with the band. But as a gang, they create this version of the world, a way of life, a shared vocabulary which is also what happens in virtual worlds. So I guess, it all makes absolute sense.

Great report from GDC from International Hobo's Chris Bateman, Only a Game: GDC: A New Vision for Interactive Stories, (thanks Kim!). Locked dead on to my own obsession, as someone who is interested in writing, interested in games, interested in the skill of writing for games. Or interactive entertainment as we call it at the BBC.

The thing that strikes me is that game design/writing should be done in very close cahoots. Someone like David "God of War" Jaffe seems to be a good example of someone who understands the great story-telling of movies and great game design of..er...games.

Whilst Aristotle (has anyone actually read The Poetics? Did it really help?), Joseph Campbell (and his modern Hollywood parser, Christopher Vogler) and Robert McKee might help on the script editing side of the work, in truth, the whole notion of games as films is only part of the story.

I thank Raph Koster for drawing my attention to the work of Mihalyi Czikszentmihalyi on Flow. The happiness we get from a good game is related to the notion of being at one with a system, near-mastering its controls such that interacting with it becomes second nature. This is the pleasure of play in its truest sense. The same pleasure we get from engaging in sport, playing music, doing excellent shopping. It's a performance buzz.

This is not quite the same kind of pleasure we get from movies, TV, theatre, literature. This is a cathartic (thanks Ari!) pleasure, a generation and dissipation of emotion by vicariously, voyeuristically undergoing an experience.

Certain game genres can give us a cathartic bonus, but great games don't have to. Very abstract, non-story games still work because we get into the flow of Tetris etc.

Therefore I posit, that it would be more helpful to think of games as being more like music (or shopping) than films. Designing a game has more in common with designing a musical instrument, writing a game is like providing a killer piece of music to play with that instrument and the joyful experience of playing the game is a combination of mastery of the instrument and journey through the score.

Official Xbox Magazine had their deputy editor hypnotised and regressed to age ten, in order to review Chronicles of Narnia. The results of the experiment is in the next edition of the magazine, together with bonus video of the event on the covermount CD.

This was a nifty ruse to be able to give a "full and fair review" of a game targeting eight to twelve year olds, as it was claimed that the journalistic market is bereft of talent in that age group. This I doubt, but I like the idea. If I was regressed to age ten and asked to play an Xbox game, I would have been reduced to a nervous wreck, screaming "this is devil voodoo, get away from me you witches" as at the time I thought Combat on the Atari 2600 was the apogee of immersive virtual reality.

Will regressing journalists catch-on? It might help them rediscover a less cynical time when events could be appreciated with a sense of wonder and empathy, rather than a hacky-calculus of how many more readers/viewers/listeners this scoop would get them. Other than that, games themselves might package some hypnosis routines to enable players to get into target market before they play.

I don't think I need that though. Most of my waking moments are spent fighting back the impulse to childishness. Maybe I could get some pro- rather than re- gression hypnosis. "We hypnotised a thirty-seven year old man to start behaving like a grown-up".

Bookwormery

Neil Gaiman: Anansi BoysA playful epic, sending me spinning off on all kinds of symbolism of the importance of spiders, story-telling and webs. Sing if you're proud to be Gaiman. I know, I shouldn't. I can't help it. (*****)

Francis Wheen: How Mumbo Jumbo Conquered the WorldNot what I was expecting, but a riveting wade through the utterly unhelpful, illogical swill of ideas that we imbibe unquestioningly as reasonable hypothesis from religion to monetarism. Awakened an interest in Enlightment thinkers, Locke, Hume - Wikipedia here I come. Plus, I got used to thinking that nothing was certain, all moral value is relative and that reality was illusory, now I'm not Saussure.

Garrison Keillor: Radio RomanceA serendipitous find in an Oxfam in Woodbridge, I'd really enjoyed some of GK's radio show that had been syndicated to Radio Four. I thought this book was brilliant for detail and nuance in telling the story of a Minneapolis radio station and touching on many truisms of broadcasting. The character's voices and the intimacy of the stories made it read like documentary, but I'm pretty sure it was a novel. Garrison, if you're reading this, you made it up, right? (*****)

James Ellroy: White JazzI can't get enough James Ellroy. I just get hypnotized by him. As noted in main blog, this immerses you in Los Angeles 1958 and all the nastiness you could imagine. One thing I wonder is how Ellroy gets away with is are the "real" characters like Howard Hughes etc. I guess you can't libel the dead? (*****)

henning mankell: White LionessMore airport thriller trash. Like literary fish and chips, I know I shouldn't but they're just too tasty. This one a bizarre plot to kill Nelson Mandela being expedited from Sweden and investigated by a downbeat local cop. Bonkers.